5X more phones sold on Amazon's Prime Day

Sale of home appliances, including television and washing machines, also jumped 8x during the sale period.

Sale of home appliances, including television and washing machines, also jumped 8x during the sale period.

BENGALURU: Amazon India's recent 30-hour Prime Day sale recorded a five-time jump in sales of smartphones, a category where the ecommerce giant had trailed behind rival Flipkart in terms of marketshare in the first quarter of 2017. Exclusive launches and deals helped Amazon India clock record sales, Amazon India's head, Amit Agarwal has said.

"The overall Gross Merchandise Sales (GMS) growth in India is much higher than the 60% increase over last year's sale globally for the Prime Day event as India is a smaller market," he said.

The platform is trying to grow the high-value but low-margin category, Counterpoint Research has said. Sale of home appliances, including television and washing machines, also jumped 8x during the sale period. "Most of our categories, including fashion, smartphones, home appliances, furniture and pantry, saw a lift during the sale though Fire Stick remained the top-selling item, followed by OnePlus phones and Seagate portable external drive," said Agarwal in an interview to ET. He declined to comment on the exact number of Prime Members in India and country-specific GMS.

According to estimates by Seeking Alpha, the number of Prime Members in the US, Amazon's key market, is close to 85 million. "Since June 29, the number of Prime sign-ups has exceeded that of the number of signups in a business as usual month," said Akshay Sahi, head of Amazon Prime India, declining to give the exact numbers. Agarwal said the sale saw 5x more customers paying through Amazon wallet, Amazon Pay while existing users of Amazon Pay did 17-fold more top-ups than a normal day due to the additional incentives and cashbacks offered on shopping through the wallet. Amazon India recently pumped in an additional tranche of Rs 130 crore in its wallet business in India in June. Close to 1,000 merchants of the 2 lakh merchants registered on the Amazon India platform participated in the sale. Rival Flipkart bolstered by the new round of funding from Tencent, Microsoft and eBay had also announced an 80% off sale event to counter Prime Day.